


Recruitment Drive

by sungabraverday



Series: Hard Times for Dreamers [2]
Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 11:17:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungabraverday/pseuds/sungabraverday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras goes looking for some fresh recruits to make up the furtive ABC Agency's support team, and gets two recruits for the price of one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recruitment Drive

The class ended, and Connor covered the cadaver that he shared with his three classmates, before cleaning himself up and stepping into the bright light outside the laboratories.

Usually this was as dull an event as any, and he would proceed directly to his flat, where he would proceed to study his ass off learning his anatomy, interspersed with breaks for his freelance work. It was perhaps not the most typical life of a medical student, but it paid his extortionate tuition, and that wasn’t so bad. 

Today, however, there was a man waiting, young, clean-cut, and rather attractive. “Connor Tate,” he asked, and Connor nodded. 

“Hello, my name is Enjolras. I have something I’d like to ask you about.”

It was all Connor could do to keep from bolting. Had he been found out at last? Was the FBI coming pounding on his door? He had rather hoped to avoid that, and anyway, it was only a temporary arrangement. He could stop. He could go back to being a bartender to pay the heating bills, it wasn’t anything new.

He took a deep breath, and let the second of his concerns take centre stage. “Is this about my last test? Because I swear, Mister Enjolras, I’ll redo it, I did study, I was just -”

Enjolras held up his hand, and Connor stopped. “It’s nothing to do with your school work. It’s nothing to be concerned about at all, in fact. I’d like to offer you a job, but perhaps it would be better if we had this conversation somewhere more private.”

Connor blinked several times, and slowly nodded. “I live five blocks from here. It’s not much, but it’s quiet.”

The other man smiled, and it made Connor’s nerves shake a little bit less than they had been. “Lead on, then,” he said, and Connor started off towards home.

* * * 

There was hand sanitizer in the front cupboard, which Connor squirted on his hands and offered to Enjolras as well. When he almost declined, Connor shook it dramatically, and he offered his hands for disinfection.

The apartment was in disarray, but the disarray of someone who didn’t have time to put things away all the time. It was somehow still perfectly clean, the carpet a single shade of beige, the bookshelves free of dust, and the kitchen free of dirty dishes. 

Connor sat down at one end of a dinner table laden with textbooks and pages of notes, and Enjolras sat at the other.

“You say you have a job offer. What for?”

“Technical Intelligence.”

“I’m a medical student, not a computer scientist.”

“You studied it in your undergrad; I’ve seen the transcripts. More importantly, I’ve seen the work you do, and it’s genius.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No?” He started checking them off on his fingers as he listed the larger jobs that Connor had pulled off recently. “Kinder Morgan, De Beers, Monsanto, the Italian government, SNC-Lavalin, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto again, Coca Cola, JPMorgan, and the Syrian government. It’s an impressive list, and I can’t fault you for the jobs you did, though the people you did them for might be a little more suspect.”

Connor blanched. “How did you know? How did you find me?”

“We hired a medical student from here, just graduated. Our boss mentioned that he was looking for someone who could code, a genius in computers. He said he’d heard of a guy, another med student, who did it in his free time, big jobs. It took us three months to work it out from there.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say.”

“Will I meet them?”

He smiled. “If you sign on.”

Connor sighed. “This isn’t CIA or FBI or NSA or something, is it? Because I don’t agree with them, their motives, or their means. The country is morally suspect as it is, and putting wiretaps on innocent people’s phone lines isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference to the national security.”

“I’m not, believe me. I don’t agree with them either.”

“Then who are you?”

“I’m part of an agency, not a government one. We seek to right the injustices in the world using whatever is at our disposal, ideally with their money and without collateral damage.”

Connor scoffed. “That sounds like some kind of Robin Hood deal, and everyone knows what happens to Robin Hood.”

“He makes a difference in people’s lives. You want to do that too. You took on some of the most corrupt organisations in the world, and used some equally corrupt funds to do it. That sounds pretty Robin Hood to me.”

“Then you don’t get it.” Connor motioned dramatically for the first time, flustered. “I’m doing this to get through med school, and then I’m going to do things properly. I’m going to become a doctor and I’m going to help people live better, healthier lives. And I’m not going to break the law every night to do it.”

“Is that why you chose medicine, then? Because it’s the legal way of doing what you really want to do?”

His hands smacked the table, and it was hard to tell whether he or Enjolras jumped more. “No, because it is what I really want to do.”

“Because you can help people? I’m offering a way to do that for more people, people whose lives are far less privileged than those you’ll be helping with a medical degree.”

“That’s only part of it. It’s because it’s a puzzle. I find something that’s wrong, and I fix it. I make people better. I make them healthier. And I don’t need to live in a hellhole of disease to do it.”

“You’ve just described hacking.”

“I haven’t. And I don’t want to do it.”

Enjolras smiled gently. “Think about it. I haven’t described you compensation. The pay is in and of itself not particularly thrilling, but we provide your lodgings, transportation if required, and generous insurance packages. Food is on the company dime too. And we can provide excellent equipment for your use, whatever you need.”

A key scraped in the lock, and Enjolras stopped talking abruptly. A bald man walked in and squirted his hands with hand sanitizer, making himself at home. He took three steps more and froze. 

“Connor,” he said slowly, “why is there a strange man in our home?”

Enjolras raised his eyebrow. “I am falling down on the job; I definitely didn’t notice two people living here.”

The next question was directed at him like a dart at a board. “Who are you? How did you get here?”

“Stephen,” Connor cut in, “it’s okay. I let him in. He wants to offer me a job.”

“I told you not to invite people back. It’s too risky, for both of us.”

Enjolras eyed Stephen appraisingly. He was only a little bit older than Connor, but he looked much more world-worn. His hair was shorn, and he was dressed in such a way as to deflect as much attention as possible, apart from his sunglasses, which were quite flashy. He took them off and put laid them on the table beside Connor, and looked between them both.

“He said we needed to talk somewhere private,” Connor explained.

“So you go to a quiet corner of a busy cafe, where no one can hear you and no one can connect you to an address. I’ve told you that before.”

“It didn’t do you much good, did it?”

“You leave that out of this. I can’t help it if I’ve got shit luck. And you should know better even without my advice. You’re playing a dangerous game and you know it!”

“People could have heard us! And I never go to coffeehouses, they’re cesspools of infection. He’s not government, he’s told me that much. Just calm down a minute,” Connor asked, placing his hand on Stephen’s arm soothingly.

Stephen snorted and shook off Connor’s grasp. “You think that’s reassuring? You’re nowhere near done your med degree yet, which means he’s after technical knowledge, which is potentially massive trouble. And if he came for me? Government is the least of my concerns.”

Enjolras cleared his throat. “I hate to disturb a lover’s quarrel, but who are you, and more importantly, who do you work for?”

Stephen fixed his focus on Enjolras. “No one.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. And even if it wasn’t, I don’t know who you are or why you’re asking, so why would I tell you?”

“Who did you work for then?”

“It’s irrelevant. I got burned, which you’d probably gathered. I don’t work for them anymore.”

Connor cut in. “Okay so clearly, two spies in one room is too much for the world to handle. Sorry I didn’t think that one through. But can you not have a brawl in my living room? I can fix it, but it’s messy and blood-encrusted carpet would seriously endanger my damage deposit. And I don’t have sterile gloves on me.”

“I have no intention of starting a fight,” Enjolras said quickly.

Stephen pulled a face. “Neither do I. I always lose.”

“Good, now that we’ve got that out of the way we can progress onto the important stuff. Like however nice complimentary room and board sounds, I have a medical degree to finish, and I still have no intention of working in the intelligence business, no matter how morally sound you claim to be, or however much you know about my past jobs.”

“Wait,” Stephen said, “how much does he know?”

Connor frowned. “He listed ten of them. The big ones from the past year.”

Stephen let out his breath in a hiss and stared at Enjolras. “What do you want?”

“No,” Connor said, “I already told you. I don’t want to.”

“That’s some serious blackmail material there. Whatever he’s offering, it’s worth considering.”

“Dammit Stephen! It doesn’t matter how good the deal is, I’m not very well going to just leave you.” The two held each other’s gaze steadily, a battle of wills for 

Enjolras’s considered the whole scenario, and muttered under his breath, “and now we get to the crux of the problem.” He turned to Connor, and said, “find out what happened, his old file. From what I’ve heard, that’s well within your capabilities.”

Connor glanced between Stephen and Enjolras uneasily. “If he wanted me to know, he would have told me. I trust him.”

Enjolras smirked, and doubled his offer. “Find out, and so long as it’s not some morally corrupt nonsense, which I doubt, I’ll hire you both. Same deal.”

The promise hung in the air. Stephen had been struggling to find a job again, and the double life had been wearing on Connor, and his school work had been getting progressively worse. They held a wordless conversation. Finally, simultaneously, they answered, “okay.”

Connor reached for his laptop, and began to type, keys clattering out line after line of arcane symbols, slowly breaking into the CIA’s web presence, and from there into their internal databases. It took hours, but no one spoke. Stephen brewed a pot of coffee at one point, and offered Connor a mug, pointedly ignoring Enjolras. He didn’t make any indication that he cared. 

Finally, Connor looked up with a smile. “Got it. CIA, recruited fresh out of college. Top marks in The Farm. First and only mission was fairly high profile in Hong Kong. It was going well, until he misspelled his alias’s name. He got out okay, but it rendered his work void, and too many people had seen him for him to take another mission. He did a few odds and ends in Langley, but nothing worked out, and they kicked him out within two years. That’s about six months before I met him.”

Enjolras and Stephen both went around to view his screen, and there it was his file, exactly as he said. He left it up for two minutes while they skimmed it, and then he closed out of everything in a few quick keystrokes. 

“The longer you’re in the more likely they are to find out something’s going on,” he offered by way of apology for the brief glance. But it was enough for Enjolras to confirm that it was the truth.

“Well, gentlemen,” Enjolras said, offering his hand to Connor and Stephen in turn, “It’s been a pleasure to meet you both, and I’d like to offer you both positions at the ABC Agency. When will you be ready to join us?”

“End of semester, if I can. It’s three weeks until exams, and two weeks of them. It’d be less suspicious to drop out at the end of the semester, and my rental agreement runs out then anyway.”

Enjolras nodded. “I’ll be in touch with travel details. You won’t need to bring anything in terms of furnishings, just your personal effects.”

He was at the door when Connor called out to him from where he stood wrapped in. “So can you tell me who the other medical student on your team is, then?”

Enjolras paused to consider, and then nodded. “You’d know him as Matthew Nichols, I believe.”

Connor’s smile quirked. “I’d wondered why the graduation booklet didn’t include which hospital had eagerly snapped him up. Okay.” With that kind of endorsement, he finally felt comfortable with the idea.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that it's plain in context, but:  
> Connor Tate = Joly  
> Stephen = Bossuet  
> Matthew Nichols = Combeferre


End file.
